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Graphics Bitcoin The Almighty Buck Hardware

As Cryptocurrency Values Plummet, Graphics Card Pricing Improves Dramatically (hothardware.com) 242

Posted by BeauHD from the cause-and-effect dept.
MojoKid writes: In recent months, the cryptocurrency industry has taken a sharp downturn in valuations of virtually all major currencies, from Bitcoin to Ethereum. As a result, cryptocurrency mining itself has become significantly less lucrative for the average miner. In addition, demand on GPUs from the major OEM suppliers like NVIDIA and AMD, has fallen off dramatically as well. Cryptocurrency miner demand for graphics cards has fallen so much so, that pricing of board partner brands like EVGA, Asus, MSI, Gigabyte and others, has returned basically to MSRP levels. This is compared to the sharp price gouging that was going on earlier in 2018 and late last year, when demand was far out-stripping supply. In fact, reports are emerging now that another approximate 20 percent price drop could be coming to GPUs this month, especially as NVIDIA is expected to launch its next generation gaming graphics card very soon. Whether or not this is indicative of some sort of cryptocurrency bubble burst remains to be seen. However, for now, gamers and PC enthusiasts are likely breathing a sigh of relief, as better supply/demand dynamics are clearly in sight.
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As Cryptocurrency Values Plummet, Graphics Card Pricing Improves Dramatically More

As Cryptocurrency Values Plummet, Graphics Card Pricing Improves Dramatically

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  • Other price-raising strategies? (Score:3)

    by sheramil ( 921315 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2018 @05:09AM (#56884910)

    So, what other essentially pointless activities can video cards perform that might raise their prices again? How about... deep learning? What's wrong with video rendering? Buy a whole bunch of them and send them to Ian Hubert so he can get the next episode of "Dynamo" out of the way more quickly.

  • "Price Gouging"? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 03, 2018 @05:10AM (#56884916)

    This is compared to the sharp price gouging that was going on earlier in 2018 and late last year, when demand was far out-stripping supply.

    So which one is it: price gouging, or legitimate supply and demand?

    Price gouging only occurs in two cases. When prices are raised artificially regardless of how low demand may be, or (more controversially) when it's an essential human need like water and there is a disaster or other emergency. Of course in the latter case a judgment call needs to be made about whether shortages are more desirable.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Junta ( 36770 )

      Well, it's also possible to induce scarcity. If it were a truly competitive market, then a competitor would have probably do a crazy production ramp up to mitigate.

      As it stood, nVidia limited their production ramp up (precisely because they expected the bottom to fall out of the market and didn't want to be stuck with a glut when it fell) and instead did various things to try to throttle customers buying GPUs (although they explicitly gave crypto-mining an exemption to some of those, because they had such

      • No, because last time around they did just that and when the bottom dropped out of the crypto market they(and AMD) were left holding the bag

      • Re:"Price Gouging"? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2018 @02:51PM (#56888288)
        That's not price gouging though because Nvidia didn't raise the wholesale price of their GPUs. Even when retail high-end GPUs were ridiculously overpriced, it was still possible to buy a pre-built system with a high-end GPU at a reasonable price because the company building it was able to get the GPUs at uninflated wholesale prices. eBayers would buy these systems and part it out, selling the GPU separately from the rest of the system (which they resold as using integrated graphics), to take advantage of the discrepancy between the system price and component market price.

        What most people don't seem to understand about market pricing is that prices for a commodity do not rise because sellers raise the price. It rises because buyers buy out all the inventory of sellers offering the item at a low price. That leaves only sellers offering it at a higher price with inventory, which buyers then perceive as an increase in market price. Sellers can then take note that the items are selling out at the lower price, and may choose to raise the price at that point (the sweet spot is when you're just barely able to keep an item in stock). But it's the buyers who cause the price increase (by depleting the market of lower-priced inventory), not the sellers.

    • So which one is it: price gouging, or legitimate supply and demand?

      Those are not mutually exclusive. You can have situations where normal market dynamics of supply and demand allow for price gouging. Happens all the time in medicine. It also would happen in certain other industries like utilities where there is a monopoly if the vendors weren't regulated. While you can certainly argue that drug prices are a function of legitimate supply and demand, the fact is that price gouging routinely occurs as well because they are taking advantage of people who have a weak BATNA [wikipedia.org].

      • I'm sorry, but did you just try to argue that medicine was subject to normal market dynamics? Really? Price gouging occurs when access to a product is restricted, either through an emergency, or entirely artificial constraints.

        • I'm sorry, but did you just try to argue that medicine was subject to normal market dynamics?

          Of course medicine is subject to normal market dynamics just like any other industry. The laws of economics are not suspended just for medicine. It tends to be regulated precisely because of the ease with which price gouging can (and does) occur but supply and demand still applies to medicine. This very fact is why those who argue against government involvement in health care are so very wrong. Normal market dynamics work but they often function in a way contrary to the benefit of society and individual

          • Re:Supply and demand (Score:4, Insightful)

            by Raenex ( 947668 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2018 @07:45PM (#56889740)

            Of course medicine is subject to normal market dynamics just like any other industry. The laws of economics are not suspended just for medicine. It tends to be regulated precisely because of the ease with which price gouging can (and does) occur but supply and demand still applies to medicine. This very fact is why those who argue against government involvement in health care are so very wrong. Normal market dynamics work but they often function in a way contrary to the benefit of society and individuals.

            You've got it backwards. The reason there's such a high price for medicine is because of the government-granted monopolies on drug patents. It's debatable whether the cost of patents are outweighed by the benefits of patent-seeking research.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by lgw ( 121541 )

          "Price gouging" just means "a price I don't like", so it can happen in any kind of market.

    • If demand shoots up and supply doesn't catch up and you complain about prices going up, then you need to decide which is preferable - having something expensive but available, or cheap but unobtainable.

    • Price gouging only occurs in two cases.

      No free market theory is a myth, according to rational actor theory - lets take the videogame industry - it's not in your rational interest to ever buy an mmo for instance. During the late 90's company CEO's were trying to find new ways to exploit gamers they took normal rpg's with single and multiplayer combined in one game and rebranded them mmo's and amped up the PR to get people to pay monthly for a game they never own. That is the definition of getting fucked.

      I'll give you another one, before it was

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by GuB-42 ( 2483988 )

        Free market still works withing the videogame industry. Supply in software isn't infinite because there isn't an infinite number of people that can run your software. With that taken into account, it works.

        For example, imagine a AAA PS4 game, costs $100M to make, 100M PS4s in the wild. It means they can't sell for less than $1 (all inclusive) or they are losing money, so they need to increase the price to the most profitable point, by whatever mean necessary, maybe around $70, or $20 + $10/month, or whateve

  • MSRP should have gone down too! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Mishotaki ( 957104 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2018 @05:11AM (#56884918)
    MSRP of the release price of a 2 year old card is not what i call a good price... we're still being gouged by the overpriced video cards that made their MSRP stay the same for so long..

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by cre1mer ( 5440320 )
      The Gigabyte 1050 Ti 4GB that I paid $100 on sale at NewEgg peaked at $200 and currently list for $180. Not much of an improvement.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2018 @07:53AM (#56885462)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Now that was a good investment 5-4-3-2-1 year(s) ago. Not only do you speculate on higher demand through cryptocurrency mining, you also get the whole AI and machine -deep- learning crowd and the gamers.

  • Yawn... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Freischutz ( 4776131 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2018 @05:25AM (#56884946)

    As Cryptocurrency Values Plummet, Graphics Card Pricing Improves Dramatically ....

    Tulip bulb market crashes, flowerpot pricing improves dramatically ....

  • Time for DRAM to return to normal too!

  • PoW-based public blockchains should be outlawed (Score:3, Interesting)

    by enriquevagu ( 1026480 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2018 @05:55AM (#56885004)

    Public blockchains [blockchainhub.net] that rely on Proof-of-Work (PoW) [wikipedia.org] should be outlawed. They encourage mining, which is basically wasting energy in HUGE amounts (in the case of cryptocurrencies, to generate virtual coins out of thin air). They are such an inefficient way of implementing the technology, in terms of energy consumption, that they should never be considered as a viable option. If you are considering blockchain-based technology, please think of the planet for a moment when architecting your solution.

    Remember the Energy Star [wikipedia.org] program? Well, that program should be extended to forbid certain technlogies. Such as Bitcoin.

    For more info, see the Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index [digiconomist.net]. Bitcoin is wasting more energy than many countries in the world. At least, now we have GPUs back to normal prices.

    • Re:PoW-based public blockchains should be outlawed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by religionofpeas ( 4511805 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2018 @06:15AM (#56885086)

      Should we also outlaw video games which are also wasting energy in huge amounts ? Think of the planet, and play a board game instead.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by q4Fry ( 1322209 )

        Think of the planet, and play a board game instead.

        A game made of tree pulp? I dare not. Think of the planet!

      • Should we also outlaw video games which are also wasting energy in huge amounts ?

        Cryptocurrency is wasting energy for nothing, there are better ways to go than proof-of-work. Video games can't be implemented any other way.

        • Re:PoW-based public blockchains should be outlawed (Score:4, Insightful)

          by religionofpeas ( 4511805 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2018 @09:27AM (#56886070)

          Cryptocurrency is wasting energy for nothing, there are better ways to go than proof-of-work.

          Problem solved then. If there are better ways, they will soon take over.

          Video games can't be implemented any other way.

          But you don't have to play them.

          • Cryptocurrency is wasting energy for nothing, there are better ways to go than proof-of-work.

            Problem solved then. If there are better ways, they will soon take over.

            You're ignoring social inertia. It's like Facebook. There are better alternatives, but it's already popular and that popularity breeds more popularity.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by lgw ( 121541 )

          Cryptocurrency is wasting energy for nothing, there are better ways to go than proof-of-work. Video games can't be implemented any other way.

          The only freedom is freedom for me to do things you find useless or harmful. Would you prefer the communist ideal where each of us work each day to the limit of our abilities to meet the needs of others?

        • Video games can't be implemented any other way.

          Sure they can. Nobody needs 4K videogames running at 120FPS. We could all return to 2010-era 3D graphics and developers would be forced to make fun and entertaining games instead of the sugar-coated-visuals crapfest they're making now.

          If that still requires too much energy, how about going back to SNES-era graphics? Still too much? How about Intellivision-era graphics? It's still videogames.

          Can you imagine how low power a 2018 Intellivision system could be? It

      • Should we also outlaw video games which are also wasting energy in huge amounts ?

        But are they? They are providing entertainment for many. What is bitcoin providing? Won't someone think of the drug dealers?

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Exactly.

        Bitcoin is using 1M times the power per transaction compared to other systems (e.g. VISA) and this will get much worse, but it provides multi-user trust. Is the lack of trust on a central organization (bank, card payment system), even protected by heavy economic & financial laws, sufficient to justify the huge energy cost of Bitcoin?

        Note that regulation forbids unefficient implementation of devices (e.g. vacuum cleaners). PoW-based blockchains should be forbidden too. Devise another implementati

        • Is the lack of trust on a central organization (bank, card payment system), even protected by heavy economic & financial laws, sufficient to justify the huge energy cost of Bitcoin?

          Easy answer to that question. Which is more expensive? Transaction infrastructure (including trust related ones) and processing costs money. The currency that will win is the currency with the lowest all-in transaction costs. Right now that is clearly NOT bitcoin outside of a few corner cases (mostly for illegal goods). Risk adjusted transaction costs for bitcoin are substantially higher than for the lowest priced alternatives. I see no credible evidence of that changing any time soon. Find a way to

      • There was a time circa 2014 that the protocol bounty dropped too low relative to real world prices, and you could not get a transaction processed in a timely manner without ponying up a bounty out of your own wallet. This is a factual scenario that already happened. Big miners did not go away, they just became pickier.

        This scenario will happen again, but the big run up in Bitcoin prices pushed it into the future.

        Of course, it is possible that Bitcoin value collapses in the future, which might drive away a

    • Don't just bash, come on, offer up an alternative on how to keep a trustworthy distributed ledger. What are you supposed to do if you can't have a trusted third party? And you can't with something like currency, it's been tried endless times, nobody has enough trust to back up a viable virtual currency, not even entire nations. Especially not nations now that I think about it. Entire point with cryptocurrencies is that you have immutable monetary policy that nobody can muck about with. That's a bloody tall
    • legalize drugs, crack down on money laundering and ransomware. That's basically that. The base line value of Bitcoin comes from it's use to trade illegal goods. In that market the crazy volatility doesn't matter since you're selling a plant for 100x what it cost to grow or you're laundering money you couldn't use anyway so the lost money is just transactional fees.

      Bitcoin and other crypto currencies are already impractical to use as daily currencies because of transaction times. If you find a way to dro

  • Over-production (Score:5, Informative)

    by The Cynical Critic ( 1294574 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2018 @06:41AM (#56885188)
    I've personally been following GPU prices pretty closely for the last year or so and from what I've seen the drop-off hasn't even been that dramatic since the start of the year and there's still plenty of air in prices, particularly for AMD cards. You can find plenty of Nvidia cards for about MSRP, thou that's not all that unusual as there's been the occasional MSRP special trough the whole craze, but AMD cards still go for well above MSRP almost all across their range and there's actually a reason for that.

    The last time there was a mining craze and then a bubble burst AMD, who like this time had the hardware best suited for this, and their board partners ended up badly over-producing and when the bubble burst almost over night finding themselves with a significant stockpile of unsold hardware. Not only that, a lot of miners also either intentionally broke their cards by wrapping them up so that they'd fail out of heat so they could return them for a refund or then flooded the second hand market with their cards, significantly reducing the demand for that surplus hardware and AMD and their partners needed to shift. The end result of this was that there was suddenly a huge amount of second hand top-end 200-series cards and really big discounts on new cards, which as you may be able to guess didn't exactly do wonders for their bottom line.

    What seems to have happened this time as that AMD and their board partners were cautious and deliberately under-produced during the craze and now that things have died down they don't have the surplus stock Nvidia has. Nvidia has reportedly even had to resort to delaying the launch of their next generation of cards just so that they can shift their existing inventory without having to resort to fire sale prices.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Mindragon ( 627249 )

      It is likely that Nvidia will discontinue graphic card production over the long run. Their focus on long term productivity gains will be in AI-based markets.

    • The whole point is that, before all the mining craziness, the MSRP was about that maximum price (a few exceptions like "Golden Sample" super-overclock cards) you'd see. The so-called "street price" was under MSRP and as soon as the next iteration of cards hit the market, the previous generation went for well under MSRP. 2-year old cards went for clearance prices.

    • Re:Over-production (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anubis IV ( 1279820 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2018 @08:53AM (#56885824)

      AMD and their board partners were cautious and deliberately under-produced during the craze and now that things have died down they don't have the surplus stock Nvidia has. Nvidia has reportedly even had to resort to delaying the launch of their next generation of cards just so that they can shift their existing inventory without having to resort to fire sale prices.

      Great points all around, but I wanted to draw special attention to this statement of yours in particular. The summary is suggesting that Nvidia’s next cards are coming soon, but Nvidia’s President said last month at Computex that we won’t see the new cards for “a long time” [uploadvr.com]. People reading the tea leaves are expecting an announcement or leaks to start in earnest next month, but with word straight from the horse’s mouth and rumors about them having far too much inventory seeming to bear out, we have no good reason to expect new cards to be released anytime soon. At best, we may see something, but we shouldn’t expect to have it in ours hands anytime soon.

    • That's not universal. The RX550 and RX560 are still lingering around the high point. The RX 570, 580 and VEGA based cards have fallen. The same nonuniversality applies to NVIDIA. The 1050 through 1070s have dropped but are not back at MSRP levels. The 1070ti and 1080 dropped quite significantly.

      There's some decent trends on this page: https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/tr... [pcpartpicker.com] and it seems mostly in line with general prices at newegg. There are plenty of places you can pick up various models back at MSRP without any

  • Every article regarding cryptocurrency (this one included) refers to the product as a "currency," but it seems like that use case has been abandoned. It is strictly an investment commodity, like oil futures. Bitcoin was popularized with the internet black markets, with purchasing drugs and prostitutes. Is that still happening? Years back I started seeing posts about graphic designers who would accept payment in bitcoin. Weeks ago I saw that there were cryptocurrency machines set up in Schiphol airport, whe

  • Cryptocurrency (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DaMattster ( 977781 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2018 @07:54AM (#56885466)
    The whole thing is a mania. There are a few people that got wealthy and the rest will be caught holding the bad as it plummets.

  • I still read the French speaking internet and this is what i see there: People are selling theirs rigs at stupidly high prices. I see personal ads in forums and second hand sale websites. I do not see any sign of anyone buying them. And they sell their whole rigs, not the individual GPU's mind you.

    Even at half the price, i wouldn't buy the cards. They have mined 24 hours a day for months or worse. Their lifespan must be well reduced.

    Thinking of the high prices of electricity there, i wonder how many of them

    • Thinking of the high prices of electricity there, i wonder how many of them mined for a loss hoping the cryptos would skyrocket.

      With bitcoin, it's typically either "win" or "lose." If you manage to find one bitcoin, then you win and it will be enough to pay for your entire rig and more. But there's also a chance you won't find anything, and you eat the entire equipment purchase.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mysidia ( 191772 )

        If you manage to find one bitcoin, then you win and it will be enough to pay for your entire rig and more

        That's actually not how mining works.

  • I am not paying $1600 for a out of date gpu from two companies [of which nvida is shady] which comes with a proprietary driver. Just because nvida thinks that is what i want - no thanks

    I would rather buy a pci card, load it with the ram myself and fit a gpu

    Until then i shall stick with the one on my mobo.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by GuB-42 ( 2483988 )

      Not buying a powerful GPU is a perfectly reasonable choice if you don't need a powerful GPU.

      But if you need it, then you have no other choice. If you think you can design your own GPU, feel free to do it, there is definitely a market. However, none of the attempts so far managed to touch AMD and nVidia. Even Intel, with all their money and expertise can't pull it off.

  • Price-Tracking Data - PCPartPicker (Score:3)

    by eepok ( 545733 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2018 @10:17AM (#56886356) Homepage

    https://pcpartpicker.com/trend... [pcpartpicker.com]

    That's what I'm watching to track prices. It doesn't look like anything has gone down to pre-July 2017 prices. It's better now, but not appropriate.

  • Switched to consoles for gaming and am quite comfortable to get off the upgrade treadmill. One purchase every 5+ years is much better (and no troubleshooting games/OS/drivers is great too).

  • This Cryptocurrency thing was a scam initiated by Eve online and CoD players to get the next upgrade for cheap so they can go on and play their second jobs and continue collecting virtual in-game currency in 8k.

    Nice move.

  • This just in from the check-your-facts department: In writing the headline and the OP for this particular linked news article, slashdot have mis-read the linked article.

    What the HotHardware piece actually says is:-

    "According to Taipei industry publication DigiTimes, there has been a definite "mining chill" that's going to positively affect GPU pricing, with its sources claiming a drop of "around 20%" in July. That's significant, and should hopefully mean that more GPUs can be had at their actual MSRP

  • Now if only DDR4 prices could come down (Score:4, Insightful)

    by yorgasor ( 109984 ) <ron@@@tritechs...net> on Tuesday July 03, 2018 @02:34PM (#56888170) Homepage

    The real killer is DDR4 memory. I can't put together a decent ESXi server without a ton of memory. To build my latest server, I had to pick Xeons that still used DDR3 memory, since I could get that at a fair price.

  • Refuse to play (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DarthVain ( 724186 ) on Tuesday July 03, 2018 @03:48PM (#56888656)

    I refuse to play that game. Video cards have been ridiculous for awhile now. Even with this dip, it is hardly reasonable. This reminds me of the HD (hard drive) scandal years ago. There was that flood, that jacked prices up. Then prices stayed up for a couple years beyond the flood as the highly consolidated HD market decided to artificially keep it that way for fun and profit. Sound familiar? There is basically two companies, AMD and nVidia, and a bunch of re-brands. Screw that.

    I mean I got an MSI Radeon HD 7850 2GB that came with two free games (which admittedly I never really played) in 2013 (so 5 years ago!) for 190$. Not only cannot I not buy a card that good for 190 bucks now, but I would pay more now and get a card with less performance. After 5 years of technological advancement...

    On top of that it had a 40$ MIR (Mail In Rebate), so it really cost me 150$... (though as per usually I think it took months to actually get the MIR).

    Anyway it's brutal and I refuse to play these stupid corporate games. If they want to start selling video cards again at reasonable prices then sure, I just wouldn't hold my breath anytime soon as no doubt they will milk this for all it is worth. I just hope my 'ol 7850 is up the the task of Fallout 76 when it comes available...

    • And where are the regulators and competition watchdogs?

      Wherever they are and whatever they are doing, it certainly isn't investigating flagrant market abuse like this...

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